Perishable Products

Fresh baked goods e.g. breads, cakes etc

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT FOOD WASTE?

If your stall business is unknowingly throwing away food waste, you could be wasting valuable money and time.

While no business has the intention of creating waste, the food retail sector alone sends approximately 460,000 tonnes of food waste to landfill per year.

In a food waste pilot at the 2016 Pyrmont Festival, 92% of stallholders said they produced ‘not that much’ food waste or ‘none at all’. And yet 4 stallholders who participated in a food waste audit at the festival produced almost 35kg of avoidable food waste (ie. edible food) over the 2 days. That’s almost 35kg of food paid for by the stallholders which was not sold to customers for profit! In a second trial at the 2016 Surfing the Coldstream Festival in Yamba, 10kg of avoidable food waste (ie. edible food) was produced in one day which could have been sold to customers.

Stallholders reported that participating in the food waste initiatives helped them find the ‘hidden culprits’ of food waste in the stall operations.

TAKE ACTION & SAVE: EASY STEP-BY-STEP PROCESS

We know as a stallholder preparing for an event you are pretty busy. That’s why we’ve prepped this simple 3 Step process to help you locate and take action to reduce food waste and save!

STEP 1: Locate your potential sources of hidden food waste

STEP 2: Identify potential tips/initiatives for each source

STEP 3: Prioritise your list of initiatives into a simple personalised Action Plan and get started to save!

STEP 1. Locate your potential sources of avoidable food waste

Hidden Culprits:

The hidden culprits of food waste can occur at all stages of the food lifecycle – before, during and after the event.

Click on a life cycle stage in the tabs above to start locating the typical hidden culprits for perishable goods vendors.

BEFORE EVENT

Some sources of food waste exist before you even get to you event.

Ask yourself these questions:

Product Designing: Do you have too many options for your target market? Are options tailored to your target market?

Estimating and ordering: Are you over-ordering for your events? Do errors occur in documentation or do you sometimes lose track of stock?

Storing: Do any ingredients spoil or lose freshness before they are used? Do you ever have cold chain failures or unexpected contamination?

Preparing: Do you have many offcuts when preparing ingredients? Do all your ingredients get used up before they are packaged or stored for transportation?

Cooking: Do you cook in batches? Do you ever burn or damage your product so that it can’t be sold?

Packaging: Do some products get damaged when you are packaging them? Does packaging result in the creation of offcuts or excess?

Transporting: Do any ingredients get damaged or spoiled during transportation?

Event Planning: Do you consider demand forecasting (market attendance)? Do you take into account the weather and what other stalls will be present?

AT EVENT

Most food waste identified by stallholders occurs during the event.

Ask yourself these questions:

Unpacking: Do ingredients ever get damaged or dropped when unpacking them at your stall?

Display: Do you prepare and display samples that are thrown out at the end of the day?

AFTER EVENT

Even once the event is finished, there may still be sources of food waste.

Ask yourself these questions:

Surplus: Do you ever have product leftover that you can’t resell at another event?

Re-packing: Do you have equipment and materials to take home and reuse products?

Transporting: Does product ever get damaged, or experience cold chain failure, during transport home after the event?

Lack of market: Do you ever take home products that are thrown out because there is no upcoming event?

STEP 2. Understand potential solutions

In the busy life of a stallholder, these tips and solutions are designed to be included as part of your wider environmental commitments to customers and event organisers, or a starting point for embarking on a journey to becoming a waste wise stallholder.

Once you’ve located where you might have sources of food waste to save, click on the relevant areas below to see what you can do to start saving now!

BEFORE EVENT

Product designing

Conduct a waste audit and use data to identify opportunities for savings, review and revisit this data on an anniversary date

Chat with staff about types of food waste that can be avoided

Modify or remove products with lower sales than others ensure you do not offer too many or too broadly focused options

generate energy through anaerobic digestion technologies (contact your local council for options)

donate end-use compost to gardening or community sustainability groups to grow more food for you

*Note – before you donate food to a charitable or not-for-profit organisation you or the Event Organiser should contact that organisation to find out what they can or cannot accept

STEP 3. Create an Action Plan for your list of initiatives

From the list of potential initiatives in Step 2, create a personalised and realistic list of actions that you can take. Complete a simple Action Plan. Work out who needs to take the action and when. Show this to your Event organiser.